Many consumer electronic devices are now being built with touch sensitive screens, for use with finger or stylus touch user inputs. Often an input includes multiple variables. For example, handwritten input may vary by color, line width and other features. In touch screen environments, each such variable is typically configured through navigating a menu or by selecting from an onscreen palette of colors or line widths. It would be advantageous to communicate this variable selection directly through the input stylus without requiring the user to navigate separately through menus or palettes. In particular, when the users are young children it is important to provide an intuitive user input experience.
In applications where user identification is important it is beneficial to provide several layers of user verification. For example, users of ATM machines match a value on their card with a PIN code in order to execute a transaction.